Pixar among the digital media studios putting Vancouver on the map

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson (right) and Amir Nasrabadi of Pixar pose for a photo during a tour of the city's top digital media studios.Photo by
Ward Perrin

The shiatsu masseuse only comes to the Pixar offices once a week.

The dedicated massage room is hard to find in the studio’s Gastown offices but if you take a left at the lighting department and bypass the multi-purpose room holding a yoga class through lunch, you’re at the door to relaxation.

Top talent, it seems, is hard to please.

The digital media industry’s 22,000 workers in B.C. take up a quarter of all tech jobs in the province. In Vancouver alone, roughly 1,000 jobs have been created and a dozen studios have moved to the city in just the past four years, said Vancouver Economic Commission CEO Lee Malleau.

And as many as 700 more jobs are expected in the next year, shifting the focus of Vancouver’s post-production houses from proving themselves to competing for top talent.

At Pixar, a 3,500-square-foot kitchen was home to a catered lunch for staff on Wednesday during a behind the scenes tour of three distinct studios in the city led by Malleau and Mayor Gregor Robertson.

Pixar parachuted into a perfect storm three years ago, self-admittedly armed with a credit card, in an attempt to skim the top talent.

“(Vancouver’s) getting a really good rep, it’s building very fast,” said Amir Nasrabadi, vice president and general manager of Pixar Canada. “The main thing is that there’s a cluster of really high quality studios that are opening up here and I think that will help take the industry to the next level.”

It’s exactly what Malleau asked for, what she called an ecosystem filled with studios and production houses, situated on the coast and close to Los Angeles.

It’s not an industry built solely on Pixar, but rather studios taking a chance on Vancouver, a city that had yet to prove it could produce top quality graphics, animations and post production.

And then there was District 9.

With four Academy Award nominations in 2010, homegrown studio Image Design made one of the major breakthroughs for itself, and the city.

The graphics-heavy film was nominated for best visual effects, eventually losing to James Cameron’s 3D blockbuster, Avatar.

But projects like District 9 expanded the local talent pool, explained partner and visual effects executive producer Shawn Walsh.

“It’s basically like a magnet. This was something that previously would only exist in Los Angels or San Francisco,” Walsh said. “Vancouver didn’t have those types of projects up until very recently.”

Walsh was a self-described “digital gypsy” — moving from project to project, regardless of the city.

Large projects, like District 9, would draw in the masses. And with a number of major studios gathering in the city, those digital gypsies can make a home in Vancouver and move from project to project within the same city.

Or, as Scott Eabe did, they could come home.

“There wasn’t a lot here beforehand,” said Eabe, a Richmond native and current head of layout at Moving-Picture Company (MPC). “A lot of people actually had to go away to get their chops.”

Eabe left for greener pastures in New Zealand, but eventually returned, telling the story while he peeled back layers of a scene from previous work on Fast & Furious.

Michelle Grady, head of film at MPC, said their small outfit, which is a branch of the London-based company and expects to add 100 staff to their 200 so far by the fall, was given a chance with the stylized movie Watchmen from Warner Brothers.

“We’re really eliminating that question of whether Vancouver can do the quality or not, that’s been our No. 1 goal,” Grady said.

Now they split work with the London office, and field requests from staff that would rather live in Vancouver than grind in London.

“The interest in Vancouver is through the roof from artists,” Grady said.

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